Divisions and Approaches
Although in principle, psychology aims to explain all aspects of thought and behaviour, some topics have generated particular interest, either due to their perceived importance, their ease of study or popularity. Many of the concepts studied by professional psychology stem from the day-to-day psychology used by most people and learnt through experience. This is known as folk psychology to distinguish it from psychological knowledge developed through formal study and investigation. The extent to which folk psychology should be used as a basis for understanding human experience is controversial, although theories that are based on everyday notions of the mind have been among some of the most successful.
List of Psychology Topics
- Activity Theory -Activity theory (AT) is a Soviet psychological theory invented by Alexei Nikolaevich Leontyev, which became one of the major psychological theories in that country, being used widely in areas such as the education of disabled children and the design of equipment control panels.
- Behavior Analysis -Behaviorism (or behaviourism) is an approach to psychology based on the proposition that behavior is interesting and worthy of scientific research. Within that broad approach, there are different emphases. Some behaviorists argue simply that the observation of behavior is the best or most convenient way of investigating psychological and mental processes. Others believe that it is in fact the only way of investigating such processes, while still others argue that behavior itself is the only appropriate subject of psychology, and that common psychological terms (belief, goals, etc.) have no referents and/or only refer to behavior. Those taking this point of view sometimes refer to their field of study as behavior analysis or behavioral science rather than psychology.
- Cognitive Psychology -Cognitive psychology is the psychological science which studies cognition, the mental processes that are hypothesised to underlie behaviour. This covers a broad range of research domains, examining questions about the workings of memory, attention, perception, knowledge representation, reasoning, creativity and problem solving.
- Evolutionary Psychology -Evolutionary psychology or (EP) proposes that human and primate cognition and behavior could be better understood by examining them in light of human and primate evolutionary history. Specifically, EP proposes that the primate brain comprises a large number of functional mechanisms, called psychological adaptations, that evolved by natural selection to effect or facilitate the reproduction of the organism.
- Psycho Analysis -Psychoanalysis is the revelation of unconscious relations, in a systematic way through an associative process. The fundamental subject matter of psychoanalysis is the unconscious patterns of life revealed through the analysand's (the patient's) free associations. The analyst's goal is to help liberate the analysand from unexamined or unconscious barriers of transference and resistance, that is, past patterns of relatedness that are no longer serviceable or that inhibit freedom.
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